The present invention is generally related to medical and/or robotic devices, systems, and methods. For example, the invention allows the system software of robotic systems used in surgery or other applications to be revised by including update data in a memory of a tool which can be mounted on a robotic arm. The software update may facilitate the use of tools which were not available when the robotic system software was installed. In another example, a medical device system having a disposable component and a reusable processor may have the processor software updated by use of a disposable instrument, thereby allowing the instrument to be used for both treating tissues and updating system programming.
Minimally invasive medical techniques are intended to reduce the amount of extraneous tissue that is damaged during diagnostic or surgical procedures, thereby reducing patient recovery time, discomfort, and deleterious side effects. While many of the surgeries performed each year in the US could potentially be performed in a minimally invasive manner, only a portion of current surgeries use these advantageous techniques due to limitations in minimally invasive surgical instruments and the additional surgical training involved in mastering them.
Minimally invasive telesurgical systems for use in surgery have been developed to increase a surgeon's dexterity and avoid some of the limitations on traditional minimally invasive techniques. In telesurgery, the surgeon uses some form of remote control (such as a servomechanism or the like) to manipulate surgical instrument movements, rather than directly holding and moving the instruments by hand. In telesurgery systems, the surgeon can be provided with an image of the surgical site at the surgical workstation. While viewing a two or three dimensional image of the surgical site on a display, the surgeon performs the surgical procedures on the patient by manipulating master control devices, which in turn control the motion of servomechanically operated instruments
The servomechanism used for telesurgery will often accept input from two master controllers (one for each of the surgeon's hands) and may include two or more robotic arms. It will often be advantageous to change the position of the image capturing device so as to enable the surgeon to view the surgical site from another position. Mapping of the hand movements to the image displayed from the image capture device can help the surgeon provide more direct control over movement of the surgical instruments.
While the new telesurgical systems and devices have proven highly effective and advantageous, still further improvements would be desirable. For example, a wider variety of surgical instruments may be adapted or developed for mounting to these new robotic arms for performing existing and new minimally invasive procedures. By having the flexibility of attaching a wide variety of new instruments having new surgical end effectors to existing telesurgical systems, surgeons may be able to perform more and more surgical procedures using minimally invasive techniques. The existing systems, including their software, processors, and manipulator actuation structures, are already being deployed in surgical rooms throughout the country and throughout the world. Unfortunately, as new robotic surgical instruments are developed, updating this base of existing capital equipment can be slow, expensive, and difficult to implement uniformly, particularly for the robotic surgical systems already located in other countries.
For the reasons outlined above, it would be advantageous to provide improved devices, systems, and methods for robotic surgery. It would also be advantageous to provide improvements for other robotic applications. Similarly, as medical instrument systems having both reusable capital equipment with reprogrammable processors and disposable components proliferate, it may be advantageous to provide improved devices, systems, and methods for updating the capital equipment, as well as providing business methods for commercializing systems for telesurgery, robotics, medical instruments, and a variety of other fields.